Former post office gives a full view of the real city
At least a few hundred of us found ourselves together in early April on a roof high above the city. The buildings of one of Houston's six or seven skylines seemed close enough to touch. Children were hiding and seeking without self-consciousness, climbing on everything, their parents singing aloud to the thumping, inescapable music, only occasionally telling them to stop stepping on the plants. It was Sunday. The golden hour. Couples had snatched the shady spots to share ice cream. I plopped down at a table to finish an espresso I'd told myself was the price of admission, and I took it all in.
I loved watching everyone posing and taking photos — of the skyscrapers, of the sky, of themselves. I wish I were the sort of person who could leave it there, enjoy it for a moment without thinking about all that I couldn't see. But I couldn't help it with such a panoramic view. A turn of the shoulders lets you look toward Second Ward, Fifth Ward, Freedmen's Town and beyond. The uniformed security guard I saw standing near the DJ's pop-up tent made me realize that this wasn't a public space anymore. I started worrying about all that's been obscured as it's been changed.
It all used to be the Barbara Jordan Post Office, with a sorting warehouse whose roof was now a park and the modernist administrative building out front where Houstonians had for decades sent away tax returns or love letters or job applications.
The buildings are set back so far from Franklin Street, on a slope at the northern edge of downtown, that I'd barely noticed them, though I'd spent years walking and biking aimlessly all over the city. Maybe that was the point. The 1960s
era administrative building's exterior is a uniform row of concrete fins as straight as spines, as serious as pinstripes on someone's dark suit. They're efficient, effective. And the building's scale is not so large as to seem domineering, but reassuringly present, there when and if you need it. Even though they were designed by the men behind the Astrodome, Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, the buildings never asked for attention. They were here to help.
Now, the buildings are POST Houston, and they are harder to ignore. This, too, is the point. In 2014, at the rear of the recession, when the U.S. Postal Service was often said to be “losing money,” the federal government started looking to sell buildings it had once commissioned and celebrated. A year later, longtime local developer Lovett Commercial took advantage of historic tax credits from this same government to buy them and flip them into something more for our moment.
What did they do? From the top down: Chicago-based Hoerr Schaudt, the firm that conjured the whimsical McGovern Centennial Gardens at Hermann Park, transformed the wasted space of the sorting warehouse's roof into the landscape I was enjoying. With elevated planted mounds and springy synthetic lawns, the park also made room for a one-acre farm that appeared freshly tilled and irrigated ahead of planting season, a source for ingredients for the chefs working in the food court below.
From here, three separate monumental staircases that glow at night lead down into the warehouse where there's a second floor of commercial spaces (now available) and a ground floor with art galleries on one side, a concert hall on the other. That's where the food court is, too, and it's thick with Houston. It's noisy, an abundant confusion of smells, logos, languages, clothes. The sorting facility, it appears, has become a mixing one. Together, the three floors of the redevelopment — all designed by Jason Long of New York City-based OMA with Houston's Powers Brown Architecture — are impressive, appending a new layer of shapes and colors and angles to the just-the-facts sturdiness of the original concrete rectangles, which were about as scintillating as paperwork.
Those rectangles were built to last in the '60s. Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson were busy. They'd designed the stadium at Rice University where President John F. Kennedy reaffirmed the value of doing hard things. Not even the sky was the limit. The moon was the destination then. They designed the Astrodome, which opened in 1965, making professional baseball and other national pastimes in this sticky, mosquito-thick city feasible.
The U.S. was growing into a capitalist power, building for the future and going big to prove it. One year later, in 1966, Barbara Jordan, born and raised only a few miles away from the post office, would be elected as the first Black woman to the Texas Senate. Later elected to Congress, she earned national prominence with her lyrical oratory during the Watergate hearings, and in 1984, the post office in her hometown started bearing her name.
That's about when sitting U.S. presidents started openly mocking the government they were running. Soon, their racist caricatures about who used social services and why would poison our discourse, and the erosion of trust in institutions, intentional disinformation and a dozen other things have brought us here, to 2022, where cynicism is a winning platform. POST comes to us after all of this. A publicly owned asset, where a government agency served the people, is now private. POST's website does a good job of saying the right things about the history of the city and these buildings, the story of the design and Jordan's brilliance, but it's a strange thing for it to declare that their ambition is to forge new ground and breathe new life into the building, trying to honor Jordan's pioneering legacy. Can you do that with a food court?
The summer of Watergate, Jordan spoke to students at Howard University. She said, “Reaffirm what ought to be. Get back to the truth; that's old, but get back to it. Get back to what's honest; tell government to do that.” Can we be honest? The flip of this property from one of service to one of commerce suggests that power has been flipped, and our government has grown too dependent, too eager to rely on developers, publicprivate partnerships and capricious charity. That often means hard things don't get done. Things that can help the people who need it. The board agrees it’s not in the best interests of the company to go to the moon at this time.
POST is the destination. The liveliness and ingenuity of the architecture and the landscape design, the desire to do something big for Houston, are meant, in the end, to help people satisfy wants in a city that struggles to meet everyone's needs. The railroad tracks that served Grand Central Station and still run behind POST curve northeast toward the Englewood switchyard, where creosote was used to preserve wooden rail ties, in Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens. Community members have reported for decades that the chemicals in the creosote had contaminated their soil and water. They watched family and neighbors die, one after the other, of cancer — and still, they waited. The government never forced Union Pacific to clean it up. The government never developed enough high-quality, affordable housing for people who decided they needed to leave or reliable transit to get them around once they did. The government never replaced the lead-poisoned water pipes there, either. As POST was being renovated with historic tax credits, the state was confirming two clusters of higher-than-expected incidences of the kinds of cancer linked to exposure to creosote in the historically Black communities where Jordan grew up.
So what's the development? Where are we going now? Have we moved forward? It's not POST's fault, and it's not Lovett Commercial's job to push for tax reform, but it's not mine to pretend I'm able to separate the spectacle of pain-free consumption, dazzling as it might be, from actual pain.
Where developments this ambitious fail, almost without fail, is where they meet the street, which is where the city begins and developers' obligations end. The walk to arrive here is uncomfortable and dangerous. The same freeways that drown out the laughter on POST's rooftop garden are being investigated for violating the civil rights Jordan spent her whole life reaffirming. From here, I guess, you really can see Houston. It is beautiful. You can take it all in — all that's been done and all that must be done still.